Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516–1831

By Constantin Alexandrovich Panchenko

Following the so called "Arab Spring" the world's attention has been drawn to the presence of significant minority religious groups within the predominantly Islamic Middle East. Of these minorities Christians are by far the largest, comprising over 10% of the population in Syria and as much as 40% in Lebanon.The largest single group of Christians are the Arabic-speaking Orthodox. This work fills a major lacuna in the scholarship of wider Christian history and more specifically that of lived religion within the Ottoman empire. Beginning with a survey of the Christian community during the first nine hundred years of Muslim rule, the author traces the evolution of Arab Orthodox Christian society from its roots in the Hellenistic culture of the Byzantine Empire to a distinctly Syro-Palestinian identity. There follows a detailed examination of this multi-faceted community, from the Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt in 1516 to the Egyptian invasion of Syria in 1831. The author draws on archaeological evidence and previously unpublished primary sources uncovered in Russian archives and Middle Eastern monastic libraries to present a vivid and compelling account of this vital but little-known spiritual and political culture, situating it within a complex network of relations reaching throughout the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. The work is made more accessible to a non-specialist reader by the addition of a glossary, whilst the scholar will benefit from a detailed bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. A foreword has been contributed to this first English language edition by the Patriarch of Antioch, John X. It contextualizes the history found in this work within the ongoing struggle to preserve the ancient Christian cultures of the Arabic speaking peoples from extinction within their ancestral homeland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holy Trinity Publications
• Release date: May 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942699101

Book preview

Printed with the blessing of His Eminence, Metropolitan Hilarion First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia

Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516-1831

© 2016 Holy Trinity Monastery

ISBN: 978-1-942699-07-1 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-942699-08-8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-942699-10-1 (ePub)

ISBN: 978-1-942699-11-8 (Mobipocket)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931933

The Russian language edition was published by the INDRIK Publishing House in 2012, Moscow

ISBN 978-5-91674-226-8

Cover image: The 7th Ecumenical Council, Icon of the eighteenth-century Aleppo School © Our Lady of Balamand Patriarchal Monastery, http://www.balamandmonastery.org.lb

The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1.  The Historical Context: Orthodox Christians Under Muslim Rule from the Sixth to the Fifteenth Century

2.  The Political Context: The Ottoman State and the Orthodox Church

3.  Geography and Demographics

4.  Shepherds and Flock

5.  Monasteries and Monasticism

6.  A State Within a State: Intra-Imperial Connections in the Orthodox East

7.  The Holy Places

8.  Foreign Relations

9.  The Catholic Unia

10. The Culture of the Orthodox Orient

Conclusion

Appendix: Patriarchs and the Sultans

Notes

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Maps

Illustrations

FOREWORD

The Church of Antioch has faced many challenges throughout its two thousand year history, but through such hardship firm and unshakeable faith in the Lord is produced. As much as this was the case in the past it is true today, when our Antiochian people in the Middle East are enduring countless trials that cause some to even call into question their continued existence in the land of their ancestors.

I am grateful to Dr Constantin Panchenko for his great labors in revealing to the world more fully the history of our people in the Middle East, drawing on sources both previously known and unknown to us, many of which have only survived in archives in Russia. He recounts to us the observations of many believers who visited our Antiochian lands in previous centuries, as well as those of delegations from our Antiochian Church to the Russian lands, Georgia, Wallachia, and other places stretching back to the late fourteenth century. His expertise in the field of archeology has also been brought to bear on the unfolding narrative.

The picture that all these present to us is sometimes stark in its bleakness. Nevertheless, we see that despite schism, natural disasters, and civil strife, our Church has survived and remains deeply rooted in its Middle Eastern homeland. In all these things, it has refused to succumb to the catacombs of darkness. We are reminded of the teaching of the holy apostle Paul that we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us (2 Cor 4:7).

This monograph fills an important lacuna in the wider history of the Christian Church as it unfolds the presence and extent of indigenous Arabic-speaking believers in the Levant. In particular, it amplifies the nature of their relationship with other non-Arabic-speaking Orthodox, with other Christians, and also with Muslim believers who have been present with us in the Middle East for fourteen hundred years. These are matters of great complexity and a fuller understanding of them will help to shape our understanding of the takfirism against which we now struggle.

I am particularly heartened that Dr Panchenko’s book reveals the history and extent of the monastic life and its main centers in our Patriarchate. We read not only of Balamand and Saydnaya, St George Humayra, and Maaloula, but also of many other communities, some of which have been revived in our own times. It is in our monasteries that theology should be leavened with the leaven of humility and become incarnate as love and prayer.

Finally, I wish to express my thanks to the husband and wife team of Samuel and Brittany Noble for their work in translating Dr Panchenko’s work into English and to Holy Trinity Monastery for preparing it for publication. This will serve to make it available to a wider international audience, both scholarly and churchly. May God richly reward them and all those who come to know more of our Antiochian Church through reading this work.

John X

Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East

INTRODUCTION

Over the past two decades, society’s attention increasingly has returned to the forgotten world of the Christian East—the whole constellation of bright and now nearly endangered cultures of the Christian peoples of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa.¹

The foremost place among these communities is occupied by the Orthodox Arabs of the Syro-Palestinian region, descendants of the ancient Aramaic population of the Near East, who preserve their own particular culture and identity, despite having lived for almost a millennium and a half under the domination of the surrounding Muslims. The fate of Orthodoxy in Syria and Palestine—from the Arab conquest of the seventh century up to the present—still largely remains a blank spot in Russian historiography.² At the same time, Russian scholarship has in the past greatly contributed to the study of the Christian East and now, it seems, it should be especially interested in the history of Arab Orthodoxy, as Russia and the Orthodox communities of the Levant have their roots in the same Byzantine (or Eastern Christian) civilization, and over the centuries, the destinies of our nations have been closely intertwined—in both the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries.

Scholars who turn to the Christian East are always attracted to its earliest stages, the first steps of Christian preaching in Syria and Iran, the ascetics and martyrs, the scribes and theologians at the time of the Late Roman Empire or the Ecumenical Councils, and the flowering of Middle Eastern Christianity in the age of the Arab Caliphate. Much less has been written about the Late Medieval and the Early Modern periods, which are perceived by many researchers as the time of deepest decline for the Christian peoples of the East. It is all the more interesting, then, to turn to such dark ages, as they are fraught with unexpected discoveries. The years of a nation’s decadence and decline are no less worthy of study than those of its flourishing. To understand properly the history of any civilization, one should be equally familiar with all the stages of its life. Moreover, the first centuries of Ottoman rule did not languish on the sidelines of history. On the contrary, they witnessed a distinct cultural—and to some extent demographic and political—rise that is worthy of close study.

The story of Arab Orthodoxy, of course, is not entirely or even primarily the chronicle of church life and theological tracts left by scholarly monks. The history of each Middle Eastern Church is 90 percent the history of the nation that it brings together. In circumstances in which the Orthodox societies of the Levant did not have their own statehood and aristocracy, the Church took upon herself the role of being the cultural, sociopolitical, and to some degree economic center of Arab Christian life. Thus, the history of the Orthodox Church in Greater Syria³ goes far beyond the scope of purely religious events and incorporates elements of cultural history, geopolitics, historical ethnography, diplomacy, sociology, the dynamics of political-military conflict, and the vicissitudes of interethnic contact: in other words, the entire way of life of the Arab Christians.

In the present work, the author has sought to give a maximally complete picture of the various aspects of the life of Middle Eastern Orthodoxy in the Ottoman period, to outline its demographics and the ethnosocial structure and processes that took place in this environment, especially the nature of Greco-Arab relations in the Near East, to show the interactions of the Orthodox of Syria and Palestine with their coreligionists within and outside the Ottoman Empire and their coexistence with other Christian confessions and Ottoman rule. Special attention is given to the schism in Middle Eastern Orthodoxy in the eighteenth century and the separation of the Melkite Uniate Church from the Patriarchate of Antioch. In this work, the major outlines of the material and spiritual culture of the Orthodox East are taken into consideration.

It should be mentioned that by the terms Orthodox East and Middle Eastern Orthodoxy, we have in mind, in geographic terms, Egypt, Greater Syria, and Eastern Anatolia. That is, the territories of the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. At the same time, the focus of this monograph is on the first two of these local churches. The Patriarchate of Alexandria is excluded from consideration because the local Orthodox Church was in full decline and barely numbered a few thousand parishioners, half of whom were recently arrived Greeks. In only a few cases shall we refer to the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, whose history in the Ottoman period is perhaps more related to Modern Greek studies than Middle Eastern studies.

The four-century period of Ottoman domination over the Arab East (1516–1918) is clearly divisible into two parts. The first constitutes the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the period of the rise of the Sublime Porte, the apogee of Ottoman power, and the beginning of its decline, when the empire still remained independent and was building relationships with its ethnic and religious minorities on the basis of their submission and interests. Although the Christian East felt a certain influence emanating from Western Europe, as a whole, it maintained its traditional way of life and developed under the influence of internal (or more precisely, intra-imperial) impulses. The second period, the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, is a time of pivotal reforms in all areas of the life of Ottoman Turkey, including in the sphere of interconfessional relations, which came to be largely determined by European diplomacy and so took on an altogether different nature. Western and Russian influence on the Middle East took on a more powerful character and contributed to a radical transformation of the characteristics of the communities of the region, spreading among them secular and nationalist views and the formation of new models of identity. For the Levant, the line between these two eras undoubtedly appears to be the year 1831, which was marked by the Egyptian invasion of Syria. The present work is devoted to the first of these periods, the era between 1516 and 1831.

The Ottoman era in the history of Middle Eastern Orthodoxy is reasonably well reflected in the sources. A number of chronicles were kept in the milieu of the Greek clergy of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, as well as of the Arab scribes of the Church of Antioch. The historiographical tradition of the Palestinian Greeks, arising with the works of Patriarch Dositheus (r. 1669–1707), were continued in the eighteenth century with the writings of the Patriarchs Chrysanthos (r. 1707–1731) and Parthenius (r. 1737–1766), while at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they experienced a veritable flourishing associated with the name of Maximus Simais (d. after 1810), Procopius Nazianzen (1776–1822), Neophytus of Cyprus (d. after 1844), and others. The chronicles of the Orthodox Arabs were revived in the seventeenth century with the efforts of the Patriarch Macarius of Antioch (r. 1647–1672) and his son the Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo (1627–1669). In the following century, the tradition of chronicles was continued by the Damascene priest Mikhail Breik (d. after 1781) and a series of anonymous authors, whose works were included in a chronicle of the Beiruti compiler ʿAbdallah Trad (d. 1824).⁴ Here, mention must also be made of the geographic literature of Arab Christians, featuring descriptions of travels and of foreign countries. The central place among works of this genre is indisputably occupied by the great work of Paul of Aleppo, The Journey of Macarius, about the patriarch of Antioch’s journey to Russia in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Alongside the Orthodox chronicles, the historical writings of the Arab Uniates are of considerable importance: the anonymous chronicle of 1782–1840 The History of Events in Syria and Lebanon, the chronicles of the Aleppan Niʿma ibn al-Khuri Tuma (mid-eighteenth century), and the Lebanese monk Hanania al-Munayyir (1756–after 1830).

A significant amount of various official documents of the eastern patriarchs have been preserved, especially all their correspondence with the heads of other local churches and foreign governments. Part of these materials has been published at different times. In addition to these, this work has utilized unpublished documents from the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA), the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AVPRI), and so on. The author also relied on Arab Christian manuscripts from the collection of the Institute of Eastern Manuscripts RAN and the Russian National Library (St Petersburg). Of particular interest in the context of the issues studied here are the colophons left by scribes in the Arabic manuscripts of the sixteenth through early twentieth centuries. These notes usually are given in the catalogs of the various manuscript collections, which also were used in this study.

In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a number of pilgrims, travelers, and scholars visited the Middle East. The descriptions of their travels vary in terms of size and value and contain information on the ethnoreligious situation, topography, and economy of the region. Of the works of Russian authors, it is important to mention the texts of Vasily Poznyakov (active 1559–1560), Arseny Sukhanov (active 1561–1562), Ivan Lukyanov (active 1701), Vasily Grigorovich-Barsky (active in the 1720s), Melety (active 1794), and Porphyry Uspensky (active in the 1840s). Among the most informative texts of European travelers are those of the Polish aristocrat Mikołaj (Nicholas) Radziwiłł (active 1559–1560), the English merchant Henry Maundrell (active 1697), and the French scholar Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, who wrote under the name Volney (active 1783–1784).

CHAPTER 1

The Historical Context: Orthodox Christians Under Muslim Rule from the Sixth to the Fifteenth Century

I do not cry for the king of this world … but I cry and weep for the believing people, for how the Almighty, holding the whole world in his palm, despised His flock and He forsook his people for their sins.

—Antiochus Strategos, 631

THE ARAB CONQUEST: CHRISTIANS IN THE CALIPHATE

The seventh century, the time of the Arab conquests, was the most dramatic landmark in the history of the Christian East. Boundaries between civilizations that had remained immutable for seven centuries were swept away within nine years. The global crisis of Late Antique civilization—depopulation, deurbanization, the decline of the economy and culture, exacerbated by epidemics of the plague, and natural disasters in the sixth century—predestined the Byzantine Empire’s inability to resist the Arab invasion. Justinian’s ambitious reign had undermined the empire’s last strength. The short-lived success of the Persian conquests at the beginning of the seventh century demonstrated Byzantium’s political and military weakness. The Persian occupation struck a powerful blow to Greco-Roman culture and the Christian Church, leading to the breakdown of the administrative and economic structures of the Middle East. In the confrontation with Persia, the empire completely exhausted its military and economic resources. The spiritual unity of the state was undermined by schism in the Church, the confrontation between Orthodoxy and Monophysitism, and the two centuries of futile attempts to overcome it. The Aramaic and Coptic East, the stronghold of Monophysitism, was oppressed by the authority of the basileus in Constantinople. The Emperor Heraclius’s attempt to reconcile the warring confessions on the basis of a compromise Monothelete dogma only worsened the situation, pushing part of the Orthodox away from the emperor. As a result, the Muslims who invaded Palestine did not meet any serious resistance from the army or the population.

Arab troops first crossed the Byzantine frontier in late 633; then, by 639, the Arabs already had conquered Syria and stood at the edge of the Anatolian Plateau; and in 642, the Byzantine army left Egypt. Byzantium lost half its territory and lands inhabited by millions of Christians; their holy places and the most famous monasteries and patriarchal sees all came under Islamic rule.¹

Heretics who were persecuted in Byzantium clearly preferred the authority of the Muslim caliphs, for whom all Christian confessions were equal. The Orthodox of the Middle East (Melkites²) perceived the Muslim conquest far more negatively, but they were not exposed to special persecution by Arab authorities. It should be added that when the Monothelete heresy dominated in Constantinople, the Orthodox of Syria and Palestine were also in opposition to the Byzantine emperor. First of all, one can speak of Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem (d. 637), to whom later tradition attributes a key role in shaping Muslim–Christian relations in the Caliphate, including the apocryphal Pact of ʿUmar.³

From the beginning, the Muslim religion took a relatively tolerant attitude toward the People of the Book (Christians and Jews), as well as toward several other categories of non-Muslims. The Arabs gave their Christian subjects the status of dhimmis⁴—people under the protection of Islam. Dhimmis enjoyed freedom of religion and general internal autonomy in exchange for political loyalty and the payment of a poll tax, the jizya (in reality, the jizya was as a rule paid collectively on behalf of the residents of a village or quarter). Christian communities in the Caliphate were ruled by their own ecclesiastical hierarchies, which held many of the prerogatives of secular authorities, in particular the right to collect taxes, conduct trials of coreligionists, and decisions with regard to marriage and matters of property.⁵

In the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians still made up the majority of the population in the lands of the Caliphate from Egypt to Iraq. At the same time, Islamization was a major concern for Christian communities. Islam, the religion of the victorious conquerors, had high prestige. Most often, Christians converted to Islam under the influence of social and economic pressure. The lower classes sought to get rid of the burden of the poll tax and wealthy people wanted to raise their status and succeed in society. Mixed marriages,⁶ the children of whom according to sharʿia became Muslims, were one of the most significant factors in eroding Christian communities, especially during the first Islamic century. Other factors, including forcible conversion to Islam, extermination, and ethnic cleansing were typical for the era of the Caliphate. Birth rates among Muslims and Christians appear to have been comparable. In any case, at the beginning of the era of the Crusades, Christians still accounted for about half the population in Syria and Egypt.⁷

Because of their level of education, some dhimmis managed to obtain a high social position in the Caliphate. Non-Muslims had a strong position in trade and finance, practically monopolized the practice of medicine, and almost completely filled the ranks of the lower and middle levels of the administrative apparatus. Christian, including Orthodox, doctors and administrators were of great importance at the caliph’s court. Masterpieces of Arab architecture of the late seventh and early eighth centuries were created by Christian craftsmen according to Byzantine techniques. The Umayyad period is considered the last flowering of Hellenistic art in the Middle East.⁸ The Russian Arabist N. A. Ivanov somewhat shockingly, but not without reason, described the Umayyad Caliphate as an Eastern Christian society under the rule of Muslims.⁹

The Fading Inertia of Byzantine Culture in the 7th and 8th Centuries

The Arabs had no experience managing a developed urban society and gladly made use of the services of former Byzantine officials in their tax administration. Before the eighth century, bureaucratic documents in Syria and Egypt were written in Greek. Until the late seventh century, many areas of the Caliphate, such as Upper Mesopotamia, remained under the control of local Christian elites. The territory of Egypt was divided into smaller administrative districts managed by governors from among the Christian Copts. This system was convenient both for farmers and the lower bureaucracy, allowing them to understate the actual volumes of agricultural products and to withhold taxes on newly plowed land. During the first half-century of Arab rule, Egypt prospered and was completely loyal.¹⁰

Archeological research in Palestine and Jordan in recent decades gives a picture of almost universal Christian presence in the cities of the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries, with Byzantine traditions of urban development, crafts, daily life, and culture remaining intact. Ecclesiastical organization and other forms of self-government were preserved in Christian communities. Churches were built and renovated and were decorated with mosaics almost indistinguishable from their Byzantine counterparts. The Arab conquest itself hardly left a material trace, and archaeologists have not found any destruction or fires. Several churches in Transjordan were consecrated in the second half of the 630s, right in the middle of the Muslim invasion. The Christian communities demonstrated their creativity and capacity to develop.¹¹

The best-preserved architectural monuments of Umayyad Christianity include Umm al-Jimal in northeastern Jordan where fourteen churches and two monasteries were active in the seventh century; two dozen churches and seven monasteries were close by. At the beginning of the seventh century, there were more than fifteen churches in Jerash (Gerasa), to which only one mosque was added in the Umayyad period. Many churches in northwest Jordan were rebuilt during the era of the Caliphate and continued to be used until the Mamluk era. In the village of Samra near Jerash, the mosaics of three churches date back to the beginning of the eighth century. Hundreds of Christian funerary stelae with inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic have also survived. In the village of Gadara in Wadi Yarmouk, a Greek inscription decorated with a cross was found from the year 662. It was about the restoration of public baths by the local Christian administrator, John, at the behest of the Caliph Muʿawiya. In Madaba, there are Greek inscriptions mentioning the bishops and construction activity up to 663. In Ramla, which was founded by Arab governors in 717 as the new capital of Palestine, the Christians built two churches.¹²

Archaeological data about the relative prosperity of Christians is supported by the testimonies of Western pilgrims who visited the Holy Land—the bishops Arculf (ca. 680), Willibald (720s), and to some extent Bernard (860s). They describe the ornate Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the golden lamps over the Lord’s Tomb, the golden cross crowning the Edicule,¹³ and the churches and monasteries in the various holy places of Palestine, including Bethany, Mamre, the Ascension Mount, and the place of the Baptism in the Jordan, where later pilgrims no longer noticed any traces of a Christian presence.¹⁴

Along with this, in the seventh and early eighth centuries, aspects of the decline of Middle Eastern Christian society are already noticeable. Many churches, monasteries, and villages—including seats of dioceses—ceased to exist, either after the devastating earthquake at the beginning of the seventh century, or after the Persian or Arab invasion. In some cities, churches were abandoned or converted into mosques and commercial facilities. Thus, in Fahl (Pella), the capital of the Arab province of Palestine, the neglect of the churches contrasted with the prosperity of the rest of the city. The clearest features of degradation and extinction appeared along the borders of the desert. Under the Umayyads, population density plummeted in central Transjordan. Toward the end of the seventh century, villages in the Negev were abandoned, including Beersheba, Elusa, and Nessana, famous for its papyrus archives preserving Greek and Arabic documents, the last of which date to the 680s.¹⁵

The Early Umayyads: Byzantium After Byzantium

The situation of Middle Eastern Orthodoxy under Arab rule was determined by a complex combination of internal and external factors, including the relationships between the Melkites and Byzantium and between the Byzantium and the Caliphate, as well as the struggle between various ethnoreligious groups in the Caliphate for influence in the Muslim administration.

In the first couple of decades after the Arab conquest of Byzantium’s eastern provinces, the Melkites of Syria and Egypt underwent a profound crisis. Church structures were in a state of almost complete collapse, with all three patriarchal thrones vacant.

The last Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, Peter, escaped from Egypt with the departing Byzantine troops. After Peter’s death in 654, a successor was not elected for him. With the arrival of the Arabs, the Monophysite Copts retaliated for their long-term persecution by the Byzantine emperors. The Coptic patriarch Benjamin, who had long been hiding in the desert to escape persecution, solemnly returned to Alexandria. The Monophysites seized Orthodox churches and monasteries and some Egyptian Christian sects, including part of the Melkites, joined the Coptic Church. After the death of the last Melkite bishops, the remnant of the Orthodox community in Egypt was led by priests ordained in Syria who formally adhered to Monotheletism.¹⁶

In Palestine, the patriarchal throne was vacant after the death of Sophronius in the spring of 637. A significant proportion of the bishops rejected Monothelete dogma and tried to rely on the support of Rome, the last stronghold of orthodoxy, and opposed Monothelete Constantinople. The Pope of Rome, appointed from among the Palestinian bishops locum tenentes for the patriarchal see, would rule the Palestinian church for the next three decades.¹⁷

Continuity in the Patriarchate of Antioch was interrupted from approximately 609 to 611 and was not restored during the war with Persia, after which came the Monothelete troubles. In 639/640, however, Macedonius, a Monothelete, was ordained Patriarch of Antioch in Constantinople, but he and his successors tried to direct the affairs of the Church of Antioch from Byzantium without taking the risk of appearing in Arab-controlled territory. That segment of the Melkites of Syria who shared Monothelete dogma obeyed the patriarch of Antioch residing in Constantinople. Those who remained faithful to Orthodoxy acknowledged the supremacy of the locum tenens of the patriarchal see in Jerusalem.¹⁸

With the coming to power of the Umayyad Caliphate in 661, the political center of the state moved to Damascus and the Arab rulers found themselves in a densely Christian environment. In Damascus, there formed an Orthodox center of influence, including a group of high-ranking Melkite officials who had a marked impact on the religious policy of the Caliphate. At the court of Muʿawiya (661–681), a tolerant ruler who respected Christian culture, several influential Christians were known, the most notable of whom was the Orthodox Sarjoun (Sergius) ibn Mansur, the caliph’s secretary for Syria and manager of his personal finances.¹⁹ In the absence of Melkite patriarchs, leadership of the community was assumed by the Orthodox secular elite, led by Sarjoun. Around 668, Muʿawiya restored the throne of the Melkite patriarchs in Jerusalem;²⁰ however, even after that, Sarjoun’s influence at the caliph’s court—and thus also in the Melkite community—remained unquestioned.

Hagiographic tradition says that Sarjoun ibn Mansur was the father of the greatest Christian theologian and writer, John of Damascus (676–748), who bore the family name Mansur.²¹ Sarjoun himself is also sometimes considered in the literature to be son of the semilegendary governor of Damascus Mansur, who handed the city over to the Arab commander Khalid ibn al-Walid in 636.²² Although sources do not offer clear evidence of kinship between Mansur and Sarjoun, it is sufficiently obvious that within the Orthodox community (as well as in other Christian ethnoreligious groups in the Caliphate) a hereditary quasi-aristocracy had formed that occupied prominent positions in the civil administration and church hierarchy.

During the period of Monothelete dominance in the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox of the Caliphate perceived the Byzantine emperors as heretics and the Arabs did not consider their Melkite subjects to be a Byzantine fifth column. The Russian scholar Vasily Bartold already drew attention to the fact that, despite Muʿawiya’s frequent wars with Byzantium, the Middle Eastern Orthodox were not subject to any harassment.²³ However, the balance of power dramatically changed in 681 after the Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, when Monotheletism was anathematized and religious unity between Byzantium and the Orthodox of Syria and Egypt was restored. The defeated Monothelete creed suddenly took on new life in the land of the Caliphate. A significant proportion of the Middle Eastern Aramaean Melkites continued to adhere to this belief. It became for them a means to preserve their ethnic and cultural identity and to avoid being absorbed into Greek Orthodoxy and Syrian Monophysitism. The Syro-Lebanese Monothelete community developed into the Maronite subethnicity, receiving its name, according to one version, from the name of its first spiritual center, the Monastery of St Maroun on the Orontes or, in another version, from Yuhanna Maroun, the legendary founder of the Maronite church organization at the turn of the seventh to the eighth century. During this period, there were repeated clashes between the Orthodox and the Maronites in various areas of Syria and Lebanon. Polemic with Maronite doctrine became one of the areas of Melkite theology in the eighth and ninth centuries. Thanks to the Byzantine–Arab peace treaty of 685, the Orthodox were able to win the authorities of the Caliphate over to their side and to use them in the fight against Monotheletism. Relying on Arab military force, Sarjoun ibn Mansur brought about the submission of the Syrian heretics.²⁴ In 745, Patriarch of Antioch Theophylact bar Qanbar, who enjoyed the support of the Caliph Marwan, once more attempted military action. According to some authors, in 745, after a wave of Melkite–Maronite conflicts at the Monastery of St Maroun, Aleppo, and Manbij, the Maronites created an autonomous church headed by a patriarch. It was only later that the mythologized historiography of that community granted the laurels of founding father to Yuhanna Maroun.²⁵

Christians of various denominations actively fought for access to administrative positions to influence the caliphs. For example, there is a well-known debate between Maronites and Jacobites in 660 in the presence of Muʿawiya, who acted as arbitrator.²⁶ During the reign of the Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (685–705), a Monophysite group led by Athanasius bar Gumoye from Edessa played a prominent role in the state. The caliph made Athanasius tutor and secretary to his younger brother ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, the governor of Egypt. For two decades, Athanasius governed the richest province on his behalf, collecting taxes and amassing an enormous fortune. For obvious reasons, Sarjoun ibn Mansur could not get along with a rival of such stature. After the death of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz around 704, when Athanasius returned to his homeland with a huge caravan of property, Sarjoun remarked to the caliph, bar Gumoye has ransacked all the cellars of Egypt.²⁷ ʿAbd al-Malik contented himself with confiscating half of Athanasius’ wealth.

Athanasius’ example demonstrates the extent of the prosperity of the region’s Christian elite at the courts of the emirs in the Caliphate’s provinces. In Egypt, alongside influential Monophysites, Orthodox courtiers of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz are known to have received from him the right to build a church in Hulwan for their coreligionists.²⁸ Although the patriarchal throne of Alexandria continued to be vacant, towards the end of the seventh century an Orthodox ecclesiastical organization with its bishops was somehow reconstituted in Egypt. Egyptian Melkites participated in church life in Byzantium: at the Sixth Council the Patriarchate of Alexandria was represented by the priest Peter, who signed the conciliar acts with the title Vicar of the Apostolic See. He also attended the Council in Trullo of 691 as a bishop.²⁹

The Late Umayyads: Pressure Mounts

At the turn of the seventh to the eighth century, the internal structure of the Caliphate underwent important changes and the position of Christians at the caliphal court was shaken. ʿAbd al-Malik emerged the winner of a long civil war and started large-scale reforms to strengthen the Arab–Muslim state. First, he began by minting coins with Islamic symbols. A new census of the territory was carried out, in which previously Byzantine and Persian inventories had been used in the administration. Individual taxation was introduced, which was painfully felt by the dhimmis. It was in the course of these reforms that the language of state records transitioned to Arabic (700–705), something that later Muslim authors portrayed as an attempt to put an end to the monopoly of Christian scribes, led by Sarjoun, in the administrative structures.³⁰ This change, however, did not much alter the status of dhimmi officials, who for the most part had mastered Arabic.

Much more painful for the Melkites was the Caliph al-Walid I’s (705–715) seizure of the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Damascus in 707. The Umayyad Mosque was built on its site, designed to eclipse the beauty of the Christian churches in its splendor.³¹ In their own times, Muʿawiya and ʿAbd al-Malik had also attempted to obtain the cathedral, but the Christian elites managed to fend them off by referring to the guarantee of the security of dhimmis’ property given by Khalid al-Walid when he captured Damascus. The new caliph, however, paid no attention to Khalid’s decree. Similarly, during the construction of a mosque in Ramla, Muslims seized columns that had been prepared by the Christians of neighboring Lydda for one of its churches.³²

During the reign of the Caliph ʿUmar II (717–720) came the first targeted religious persecutions against Christians. The cause was the growing discontent among Muslims caused by the dhimmis’ wealth, prosperity, and influence. Umar introduced restrictions for Christians in dress, forbade the building of new churches, and encouraged dhimmis to convert to Islam. Muslim tradition attributes him with expelling Christian officials from service. Such purges of infidels from the administrative apparatus were carried out during each persecution. It did not, however, achieve tangible results because for a long time not enough educated Muslims in the Caliphate were able to replace Christians in public service.³³ In 724, under the Caliph Yazid, a campaign against images of living things in churches swept through the Middle East.³⁴

In this period, the Orthodox community was already led by Sarjoun’s successors, including John of Damascus, who inherited from his father the post of caliphal secretary. He was certainly a witness to these persecutions and, moreover, at the end of the 720s John himself fell into disfavor and went to a monastery.³⁵

Soon, however, Arab–Melkite relations entered into a new, more favorable phase. When the doctrine of iconoclasm prevailed in Byzantium in 726, it provoked a sharp rejection from Middle Eastern Orthodox. It was here, in the late 720s and early 730s, that John of Damascus formulated the first profound justification for the veneration of icons and Middle Eastern bishops anathematized the emperor Leo the Isaurian.³⁶ Byzantine monks, fleeing iconoclast persecution, came to Palestine. On the day of Pentecost 764, the three Eastern patriarchs, by prior agreement each in their own city anathematized Bishop Cosmas of Epiphania, who had joined the iconoclasts.³⁷ The acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council preserved the epistle of Patriarch Theodore of Jerusalem (d. after 767) to the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, justifying the veneration of relics and icons.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, which restored the veneration of icons, was attended by representatives of the three Eastern patriarchs, the syncellus John, and the abbot Thomas, who actively supported the council’s decisions.³⁸

From the beginning of the iconoclast turmoil, the Umayyad Caliph Hisham (724–742) no longer had any reason to see his Melkite subjects as supporters of Byzantium. This seems to be behind the restoration of the Orthodox patriarchal sees of Alexandria (731) and Antioch (742).³⁹

Thus, by the middle of the eighth century, Orthodox ecclesiastical structures in the regions of Egypt and Syria were completely restored and mechanisms developed for the self-government of the Orthodox community, which upheld its interests before the Muslim authorities. The laity did not play as much of a role in the management of the community as it had during the era of Sarjoun and John of Damascus. In the Orthodox community during the eighth to tenth centuries, however, one can clearly observe a merger of the secular elite with the theocratic church hierarchy and the migration of influential laymen to bishops’ posts. Sarjoun’s adopted son Cosmas became bishop of Mayouma. In the ninth century, two descendants of Mansur held the See of Jerusalem: Sergius (844–860) and Elias (880–909). Influential physicians repeatedly became patriarchs of Alexandria, such as Politianus (767–801) and the famous historian Eutychius (Saʿid ibn Batriq, 934–940). Members of the class of kuttab (scribes) ascended to the throne of Antioch, such as Elias I (905–932/4), Theodosius II (935–942), and Christopher (960–967).⁴⁰

Arab authorities repeatedly interfered in the election of patriarchs, seeking the election of their protégés and sometimes even Christian officials in the administration of the caliphate who had not previously held any spiritual dignity. The Muslims were primarily concerned with ensuring the loyalty of the Melkite bishops. For this reason, the Syrian monk Stephen was made the first Patriarch of Antioch in 742, although he did not know Greek and was in no way connected with Byzantium.⁴¹

The political sympathies of the Melkite bishops, balancing between the two empires, could differ quite a lot. On the one hand, around 757, Patriarch Theodore of Antioch (751–773) was exiled to Transjordan for alleged contacts with Byzantium.⁴² On the other hand, some bishops cooperated with the Muslim authorities so long as it did not affect their religious beliefs. Patriarch Job of Antioch (811/2–842) went the furthest of all down that path. Around 821, by order of the caliph, he crowned the Byzantine rebel Thomas the Slav with the imperial diadem (for which he was excommunicated by the Synod of Constantinople), and in 838, he accompanied the Arab army in the campaign against Amorium and persuaded its besieged garrison to surrender.⁴³

At the same time, for the majority of Melkites, even those absolutely loyal to the Muslims, there was a longstanding characteristic attitude toward Arab rule as something that God allowed to take place for the time being, a feeling of belonging to the Byzantine world, and the perception that the Emperor of Constantinople was their true lord and protector.

The Culture of the Melkites

In the seventh and eighth centuries, the cultural creativity of the Syro-Palestinian Christians continued. The eastern half of the Byzantine Empire that had been captured by the Arabs was still part of a common cultural space with the rest of Byzantium. The contribution of the Middle Eastern Melkites to general Byzantine culture was comparable to what was created within the empire itself.

Mosaics of Palestinian and Transjordanian churches of the eighth century represent rare examples of Byzantine fine art contemporary to the iconoclastic era, which did not leave similar monuments in Byzantium.

The Sinaite monks John Climacus (d. ca. 650) and Anastasius of Sinai (d. ca. 700) had a tremendous impact on Eastern Christian theology. Andrew of Crete (660–740), the great composer of Byzantine church poetry, spent the first half of his life in the Middle East and was a monk of Mar Saba (the Lavra of St Sabbas the Sanctified) and secretary to the locum tenens of the See of Jerusalem. There, at Mar Saba and in Jerusalem, John of Damascus, the greatest Christian thinker of the eighth century and the last of the fathers of the church, spent the most productive years in his life. The Damascene’s foster brother, Cosmas of Mayouma, also a monk of Mar Saba and then bishop of Mayouma (near Gaza), left an enormous poetic heritage. Living at the turn of the eighth to the ninth century, the Sabbaite monks Stephen the Younger and Leontius composed a number of hagiographical works about the Palestinian martyrs and ascetics of their time.

The chronicles of Syrian Melkites had a direct influence on the development of Byzantine historiography. The anonymous Melkite chronicle of 780 was extensively used by Theophanes the Confessor in his Chronography.⁴⁴ In contrast to the self-contained, sealed-off classical culture of Byzantium, the Melkites, who lived at the crossroads of civilizations, were more open to cultural contacts. This resulted both in their polemics with people of other faiths and their translating into Greek works of Syriac literature.

Although most of the Orthodox of the Holy Land were not Greeks, but rather Hellenized Aramaeans, as well as Arabs in Transjordan and the Negev, the language of Christian literature was predominantly Greek. The liturgy was conducted in Greek with Syriac translation, when necessary. Within the Patriarchate of Antioch, liturgical services were conducted in Syriac and Orthodox literature existed in Syriac. It included not only liturgical texts and translations from Greek but also original works. Mention can be made of the anti-Monophysite treatises of George, bishop of Martyropolis, and his disciples Constantine and Leo, who successively held the episcopal see of Harran at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries or the anonymous Aramaic Life of the Sixty New Martyrs of Jerusalem composed in the middle of the eighth century.⁴⁵

The theme of suffering for the faith held a special place in the literature and consciousness of the Caliphate’s Christians. Images of the martyrs were important symbols of identity. The history of the Churches of Antioch and Jerusalem in the eighth and early ninth centuries was adorned by the deeds of several such martyrs. Acquaintance with their biographies paradoxically confirms the relative tolerance of Muslim authorities and their compliance with the rules of shariʿa regarding dhimmis. Many of the Christians executed by the Arabs were Byzantine prisoners of war who did not belong to the category of dhimmis, such as the Sixty New Martyrs of Jerusalem in 724, the Forty Martyrs of Amorium in 845, or the Byzantine monk Romanos the New (d. 778), who moreover was charged with espionage.⁴⁶ Some of the zealots wanting to be found worthy of a martyr’s crown themselves publicly denounced the Islamic faith and the false prophet Muhammad, which, of course, was severely punished according to Muslim law (Peter, metropolitan of Damascus, who, however, was not executed but rather exiled in 743, and Peter of Capitolias, murdered in 744).⁴⁷ Islam punished apostasy just as radically: executed for this were Christopher, a monk of Mar Saba and a convert from Islam in 799 or 805, and St Anthony/Rawh, a Muslim noble who converted to Christianity and tried to win over others. Under ʿAbd al-Malik, Michael, a monk of Mar Saba, was executed on false charges of apostasy. On account of the same slanderous accusation, Elias the New from Baalbek was martyred either in 779 or, according to a different estimate, in 795.⁴⁸

Among the martyrs of the early Arab period is the interesting figure ʿAbd al-Masih al-Najrani al-Ghassani (d. in the 860s or, according to another account, the 750s). A Christian who converted to Islam and took part in the raids on Byzantium, he repented of his past, returning to Christianity and becoming a monk on Sinai. Desiring to die for Christ like other voluntary martyrs, ʿAbd al-Masih went to Ramla to denounce Islam before the Arab governor. At the last moment, however, the monk did not have sufficient strength of will and he left the city. Human weakness, no stranger to ʿAbd al-Masih and something that the author of his Life does not attempt to hide, distinguishes this figure from the stereotyped hagiographic heroes abundantly represented in Byzantine literature. In the end, the monk nevertheless acquired a martyr’s crown when one of the Muslims recognized him and accused him of apostasy.⁴⁹

These examples show the high intensity of religious feeling among Middle Eastern Melkites in the seventh and eighth centuries. The same can be said for the monastic movement, not much inferior to that of the Early Byzantine era. Stories about the Sinaite fathers—contemporaries of John Climacus—suggest that the early Byzantine monastic tradition was maintained unchanged.⁵⁰ On the basis of the written sources, the total number of Palestinian monasteries was quite large, but a precise count cannot be given. Alongside the monasteries in cities and densely populated rural areas, the remote monasteries of the Judean Desert and the Jordan Valley attracted the attention of pilgrims and hagiographers. Central among these was Mar Saba, about 15 kilometers to the east of Jerusalem. Along with Mar Saba should be mentioned the lavras of St Euthymius the Great, St Theodosius the Great, St Chariton (Mar Kharitun), and others along the same mountain range between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. Among the monasteries along the Jordan, the best known were the Monastery of St John the Baptist, where at the beginning of the eighth century there were as many as twenty monks,⁵¹ the Monastery of St Gerasimus, and the Monastery of St George of Koziba in the Wadi Qelt. Among the monks of the Judean Desert mentioned in the sources are natives of Palestine, Transjordan, Egypt, and southern Syria. Syriac-speaking monks had a separate community with its own presbyter in Mar Saba. The main source for the history of Palestinian monasticism in the eighth century is the Life of the famous ascetic, Stephen the Wonderworker the Elder (725–794), written by his disciple Leontius at the beginning of the ninth century.

In his youth, Stephen spent five years in a narrow cave, almost never leaving it. Several times for the entirety of Lent the hermit went into the desert near the Dead Sea, where he fed only on the tips of reeds. During the last thirty years of his life, he received the gifts of conversing with God, healing the sick, and predicting the future. There were monks who claimed to have seen Stephen walking on the water of the Jordan and the Dead Sea with his hands lifted up to heaven, glowing radiantly. An interesting event in Stephen’s Life is a conversation he had with a Christian from Transjordan, whom the ascetic encouraged to become a monk and go out into the desert. Now it is possible for people to please God in the world as well as in the desert, Stephen’s companion replied to him.

It seems preferable to me to suffer evil with God’s people who are in great distress and affliction … than to pay attention to oneself in silence and not help anyone … Now life in the world is more difficult and sorrowful … for we see that monks enjoy great tranquility and rest, while those in the world are in great distress and misfortune.⁵²

Perhaps the person saying this was unwittingly exaggerating, but nevertheless the perception among laypeople in the Caliphate of the monastic life as quiet and comfortable is quite remarkable.

At the same time, relations within the monastic community were not always sunny. There are mentions of conflicts in Mar Saba. According to the hagiographer of St Stephen the Wonderworker, Some novices, deceived by demons, rebelled at the end of the service and beat some of the elders with sticks and maliciously laid hands on the venerable … abbot himself.⁵³

There is significantly less information about Syriac monasticism. Its main center, as during the Byzantine period, remained the Monastery of St Symeon the Stylite (Mar Sam‘an) in the desert 70 kilometers northwest of Aleppo.

The ʿAbbasid Revolution

The most important internal milestone in the history of the Caliphate was the coming to power of the ʿAbbasid dynasty in 750 after a bitter civil war. Egypt briefly became the last refuge of the defeated Umayyads. Taking advantage of the collapse of power structures, the local Christians started a revolt.

The insurrection was primarily caused by economic oppression by the Arab governors. After ‘Abd al-Malik’s reforms, officials became more exacting with regard to tax collection. Peasants were prevented from migrating or attempting to take shelter from taxation in monasteries. Christian grassroots administration was replaced by Muslim governors. The authorities imposed civil servants who were responsible for collecting taxes. The fiscal apparatus became more efficient, and so oppression of Coptic peasants increased. In response, starting in 725, the Christians repeatedly rebelled.⁵⁴ These uprisings were not religious in nature and the Church, concerned about preserving its privileges and property, did not try to lead the popular unrest. Nevertheless, in 750 both patriarchs—Coptic and Orthodox—joined the revolt. In one of the battles, the patriarchs were captured, but the Orthodox primate Cosmas managed to get ransomed. Finally, ʿAbbasid troops invaded Egypt and defeated the Umayyads.⁵⁵

Under the new dynasty, the political center of the state moved from Damascus to Mesopotamia. The displacement of trade routes and centers of economic activity painfully affected the well-being of Middle Eastern Christians. Unlike under the Umayyads, Melkites did not play a serious role at the ʿAbbasid court. Among the Christian denominations in Baghdad, the Nestorians were dominant. In 912, they foiled an attempt by the Melkites to gain a foothold in the ʿAbbasid capital, achieving the expulsion of the Orthodox metropolitan of Baghdad. Among the heads of all the Christian churches, only the Nestorian catholicos was allowed to have a residence in the Caliphate’s capital.⁵⁶

With the coming to power of the ʿAbbasids, the moral climate in the government changed and many Muslim caliphs attempted to demonstrate their piety, which adversely affected the position of peoples of other faiths. Contrary to remarks by Bartold about the caliphs’ tendency to patronize the Melkites during their conflicts with heretical Byzantine emperors, the greatest of the ʿAbbasid caliphs, al-Mansour (755–775), severely persecuted Orthodox Christians in his domains at the same time as the iconoclast persecution under the Emperor Constantine V Copronymus (743–775) in Byzantium. The death of the two monarchs, which occurred in the same year, was welcomed in the Melkite Chronicle: These two terrible beasts, who for so long had plagued the human race with equal ferocity, died by God’s merciful providence.⁵⁷

Generally speaking, under the early ʿAbbasids, persecution broke out only sporadically. The caliph al-Mahdi (775–783) demanded that the last Bedouin Christians from the tribe of Tanukh in northern Syria convert to Islam. Their leader refused and was executed. The Tanukhid women, however, retained their religion, and churches were active in the tribe’s territory for some time. Several Christians were martyred in Emesa (Homs) in 780. In 807, many churches in Syria were destroyed at the order of Harun al-Rashid.⁵⁸ In general, the position of Middle Eastern Christians did not depend so much on the policies of the caliphs as on the mood of the governors, some of whom subjected Christians to extortion and destroyed their churches, whereas others allowed them to renovate their places of worship and to erect new ones.⁵⁹

The First Crisis of the Christian East

Starting in the middle of the eighth century, there was an increasing number of crises in the life of Middle Eastern Melkites. The catastrophic earthquake in January 749 led to the destruction of many cities and monasteries that were never restored. Inhabitants abandoned Gerasa, Gadara, Umm al-Jimal, and other cities. A number of villages were simply abandoned but not destroyed.

At the same time, hundreds of towns and villages on the rocky hills between Apamea and Aleppo, in the region archaeologists call the country of the dead cities, were abandoned. These cities had once thrived on account of the export of olive oil through Antioch to all corners of the Pax Romana. The rupture of old ties and the decline of Antioch forced farmers to abandon the highly specialized economy of olive cultivation and to return to subsistence farming. Wheat could not grow in the arid hills and residents left their homes to go down into the valleys.⁶⁰

From the beginning of the ʿAbbasid era, church construction declined, the quality of mosaics decreased, and the language of inscriptions deteriorated; thus, local Christians lost their knowledge of Greek.⁶¹ The traces of iconoclastic damage, discovered in many Jordanian churches, also have been associated by historians with this period of time. No doubt, the Christians destroyed images of living creatures, sometimes carefully replacing them with new mosaics. In the most famous of these mosaics, the image of a bull was removed and replaced with an inanimate date palm. In this case, because of the negligence of the workmen, hooves and a tail hang from the bottom of the palm trunk. The motivations for these acts are rather vague, but it seems that those who vandalized the mosaics were not inspired by the theories of the Byzantine iconoclasts, but rather by Islamic (or a broader Semitic?) rejection of images of living beings. Clearly, there was either pressure on Christians from the Muslim environment or major shifts in the attitudes of these Christians during in the ʿAbbasid era.⁶²

By the turn of the eighth to the ninth century original literary activity by Christians almost ceased, writers and saints disappeared, and Greek fell into disuse. Both literary and material sources themselves, by which we can judge the subsequent life of Middle Eastern Christians, disappeared or radically changed. Joseph Nasrallah called the three hundred years from the ninth to the eleventh centuries the great lacuna in the history of Palestinian monasticism.⁶³ These words can be applied to almost the entirety of the Orthodox Middle East during the High Middle Ages.

It can be argued with reasonable certainty that the crisis in Middle Eastern Christian society did not occur immediately following the earthquake of 749, although the latter did deal a severe blow to the ecclesiastical and secular structures of the Melkite community. There are several examples of construction activity by Christians of Transjordan in the second half of the eighth century. Archaeologists have discovered inscriptions marking the renovation of churches in Umm al-Rasas in 756 and Madaba in 767.⁶⁴ By the end of the eighth century, however, such activities came to naught.

The decline of the Christian community was compounded by the general political instability of the Caliphate and the inability of authorities to maintain order and stability. The most striking evidence of this kind is the narrative of Stephen the Sabaite concerning the martyrdom of Sinaite monks killed by the Saracens in 796. It gives a vivid picture of the bloody chaos in Palestine at the end of the eighth century when the Bedouin tribes of Mudar and Yemen fought each other. Many villages were looted and burned, whereas the villagers discarded everything and fled to the cities, which, however, were not much of a safe haven. Hordes of bandits ravaged Gaza, Ashkelon, and Eleutheropolis. In March 797, a band of rebellious Bedouin captured Mar Saba and, to extort the monastery’s treasures from the monks, tortured to death twenty of its inhabitants.

The crisis of Palestinian monasticism was perhaps largely associated with the rampaging nomadic element in the Judean hills and multiple devastations of the monasteries at the turn of the eighth to the ninth century. Although the monks said with fervor that they should not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul,⁶⁵ the common human instinct for self-preservation was not alien to them. Even contemporaries, who believed that Stephen the Wonderworker was the last of the great ascetics, felt the nascent decline of the monastic movement. At the present time, wrote Leontius, Stephen’s biographer, monastic struggle has weakened in the ten years since the earthquake [of 749?] and it will grow weaker and weaker because laziness and carelessness will increase.⁶⁶

Sinaite monasticism entered a period of decline at the same time as Palestinian monasticism. In the Early Arab period, almost all the cells and monasteries on Mount Horeb, towering over the Sinai Monastery of the Burning Bush (St Catherine’s), were abandoned. Medieval ceramics have been found at only three of fifteen sites from the Byzantine period. The monasteries in the Umm Shomer mountains to the south of Mount Sinai likewise went derelict. Traces of a later presence are found only in four of the eleven Byzantine monasteries. The very quality of the construction of churches and cells deteriorated sharply—the rectangular Byzantine buildings of hewn stone were replaced by rougher structures with rounded corners built of unhewn stones.⁶⁷

Disasters occurred repeatedly for Palestinian Christians in 809 and 813, during the civil war that engulfed the Caliphate after the death of Harun al-Rashid. According to the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, the Hagarenes killed, plundered and rampaged in every possible way and indiscriminately against each other and against the Christians, devastating the churches of the Holy City and the desert monasteries. The chronicler tells us of the arrival in Cyprus in 813 of many Christian refugees

because in Syria, Egypt and Africa there arose total anarchy, murders, robberies, and fornications in the villages and towns. In the Holy City they desecrated the most revered sites of the holy Resurrection. In the desert the famous Lavras of St Chariton and St Sabbas [Mar Saba] and other monasteries and churches were likewise devastated.⁶⁸

It was perhaps during these migrations that the last bearers of the Greek language and Byzantine literary culture left the Middle East.

During almost the same decade, the Coptic community experienced a similar political collapse. Starting in the eighth century, the population growth that was observed in Egypt during the first decades after the Arab conquest stopped. As mentioned, there were repeated uprisings of Coptic peasants against the tax burden, in which Muslims also sometimes took part. The most powerful uprising occurred in the years 829–831 in the Lower Delta. As before, church leaders did not try to lead the revolt and give it the character of a national-religious struggle. Rather, the church preached humility. In 831, the patriarch tried to persuade the rebels to lay down their weapons and avoid a massacre. His peacemaking was not successful. The caliph personally led a punitive expedition, the rebellion was crushed, captured rebels were executed, and their families were sold into slavery. The deserted villages were settled by Muslims and many churches were turned into mosques. After this, the Copts no longer attempted to rebel.⁶⁹ According to several scholars, the suppression of the last Coptic peasant uprising broke the back of mass adherence of Copts to Christianity.⁷⁰

Attempts to explain the decline of Christianity in the Middle East by the fact of the Arab conquest have now been dismissed by scholarship in view of the clear evidence of the dynamic development of Christian communities in the seventh and eighth centuries. Epidemics, earthquakes, and the transfer of the Caliphate’s capital to Baghdad, as well as an environmental crisis in the Middle East with desert encroachment and the expansion of nomadic tribes, undoubtedly played a negative role in the fate of Eastern Christians. However, according to scholars, all this is secondary. Something broke within the Christian community, but we are unable to grasp what this something was.⁷¹ There appeared some deep and global laws of historical development, a process of losing vital energy that led to the death of the Classical civilization itself in whose bosom Christianity arose. The economic system, the culture, and the social relations characteristic of the Late Antique society disintegrated.

This process has been blurred over time, but if one is to choose an approximate date, it would be the civil war between al-Amin and al-Ma’mun in the years 811–813. It seems to have been perceived by contemporaries as a global catastrophe. The political upheavals caused a surge in apocalyptic feelings among Syriac Christians and the circulation of corresponding literature.⁷² All this is not without profound symbolism: for them, the end of the world really did come. It was the end of a Middle Eastern society of the Byzantine character, as we might call it.

THE DARK AGES

The Birth of New Ethnic Groups (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries)

Then, out of the darkness of the ninth century emerged a new society of Syro-Palestinian Christians, characterized by increasing Arabization and the loss of contact with Byzantine culture. The language barrier heightened the cultural isolation of the Middle Eastern Melkites from Byzantium. Greek authors of the mid-ninth to eleventh centuries write almost nothing about the Holy Land. Melkite Palestinian sources are few and particular. This vexing lack of sources indicates more eloquently than any texts the drastic drop in the educational level of the general population and the decay of old mechanisms of cultural reproduction. Likewise, almost no archeological sites survive from this era. All this determined the extremely limited availability of information about the Melkite community in the ʿAbbasid era.

There is reason

Reviews for Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516–1831

[steve_walker-348810 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Christianity has its origins in the Middle East. This is common knowledge. Until recently, that was the most anyone, interviewed on the street, could say. The idea that that early Church was mostly Arabic in origin is a new and radical idea to many people. The history of those Arab Christians is only now coming into print in the English speaking, Western world. "Arab Orthodoxy" is the translation of a Russian book published several years back. It is an excellent and detailed study of early under the Ottomans. It is the type of book that one does not rush through. There is a great deal of information that must be read and mulled over. Hopefully this book will lead to others that focus on earlier periods when the Byzantine Empire was flourishing.